Discussion (45) ¬

I’m loving these exposition pages. It’s always fun to see the worldbuilding involved with a fictional world.

1) Illusion, along the vein of “Invisibility” but with the belief that the illusioned are mundane plants. This is broken by doing something very unplantlike: jumping up and screaming. The Nuts do that, but they are sapient nuts.
2) Manifestation of Mana from energy into plant matter in the shape of a costume.

I know it’s lame to come in years later and noone will probably read this except the future readers, but for the sake of validating the OP’s response, he brought up the nuts to validate his reasoning for why jumping up and screaming as bushes would invalidate his reasoning that jumping up and screaming is an “unplantlike” action. Also to say that Victor probably does know why OP brought them up, but just thought it was weird that OP mentioned unplantlike actions when they had sapient nuts in the first place.

The other reason is that OP answered my in-head question of what the other way was, because I wasn’t sure if manifesting a leaf-suit would be a reasonable explanation for how they ended up in a balled up bush shape from their original forms (also becoming smaller).

love the shading on this page, and i liked seeing the lava girl again. i liked her.
i’m guessing a spell that effects consciousness like invisibility or converting mana to matter. or like teleporting gone wrong, but he meant to mess up the re-assembly process and re-form into plants.

1: As the invisibility spell, simply redirect the flow of peoples’ perceptions on the magical plane so that they appear as bushes, instead of invisible. First reason against this would be that this sounds draining, but presupposing it isn’t draining, the reason he wouldn’t just turn invisible would be because invisibility is DREADFULLY inefficient, and possibly self-destructive in groups, as I believe Skarva is smart enough to realize.
2: Encouraging the growth of plantmatter onto their flesh by pushing energy into the plants. Very simple, very energy efficient, very painful, doesn’t sound like the sort of thing Skarva would like, plus size limitations would occur which would cause the bush to be EXACTLY equal to them in size, plus a few inches/feet.
3: Summoning plantmatter ontop of them. See 2, but more energy efficient.
4: Changing the flesh into moving plantmatter. I could actually see Skarva doing this one, but it sounds DREADFULLY more energy draining then 1 to me, so I’m thinking not.
5: Much along the lines of 1, but simpler to my mind, trading images with a visible bush. That’d mean that, somewhere, some poor gardener got a surprise as, moving from clipping a lovely bush, looked up and OH GEEZ, SKARVA the 4TH! It sounds simpler to my mind then one, because that would mean an image of a bush wouldn’t need to stay with your spirit, simply a location, which wouldn’t edit if you started thinking about other things for a moment. That said, it doesn’t sound like it would actually work under this magic system any better then one, per se.

Victor will have to tell you if all of those are plausible or not, but I am delighted by the image of Skärva and Derk blankly standing around in someone’s yard. And both of them horifically without eyes, seeing as Skärva left the image of their eyeballs behind.

Almost all of these could technically fit into the system of magic, although you’re a bit wrong about which ones are more efficient. For example, #1 is actually pretty easy to do, and efficient. Invisibility is much harder, though, because it’s more difficult to convince someone that something that should be visible isn’t. However, making someone think that they’re looking at a bush is perfectly reasonable when they aren’t particularly expecting something else. It also depends on the other person’s strength of spirit.

#4 definitely isn’t reasonable at all. Most wizards in Idenau try not to mess with their own physiological make-up, and I imagine that replacing all of your skin with plant matter would make you seriously ill, or possibly dead.

Also, #5 is a bit… out there. It sounds to me like it’s a subset of teleportation (of only the body, not the spirit), which is incredibly difficult still. The other possibility is that it’s still just a suggestion, which would make it equal to #1. If you mean something other than that, then I don’t think it’s actually possible in this system of magic. You might have to explain in a bit more detail.

#5 was, basically, #1’s concept but using available materials. To my mind, simply creating the mental image of a bush and sustaining that would mean that the image could be corrupted by other thoughts. Like, oh, hey, Sandwich! Suddenly, the bushes are sandwiches. Now, given that this is sustained by the spirit and not the mind, it is entirely possible that that worry doesn’t exist. Plus, convincing people that you’re a bush that definitely exists sounds much easier if the bush DOES already, in fact, exist, just not where they think it does.

#4 I kinda doubted, but I don’t know the full physiological editting capacities of this magic system, so I had to list it.

#1, I don’t quite get your logic, because by that logic one could attribute the appearance of the wind as one’s personal appearance, and still technically be invisible to anyone without any troubles as to how, precisely, it’s more expensive then invisibility or switching to a bush, that SAID, I tend to have issues understanding how illusions work to begin with according to many people.

Changing thoughts won’t ruin a suggestion, the focus is a different kind of mental focus. It’s like lying: when you tell a lie, what you said can’t ever change. However, you have to focus to keep the lie going, or else you might accidentally reveal it. The initial magical suggestion can’t change, it just takes spirit and focus to keep it in place.

Changing your appearance to the wind’s is the same as becoming invisible; either way, you have to convince someone that you aren’t visible. Convincing someone’s consciousness that they’re looking at nothing when their eyes are telling them that something’s there is hard, but changing what they think they see is a bit more comfortable.

It all comes down to how satisfied a person’s consciousness is with your suggestion.

Question, what happens if a ghost possess a magical object? Like for example if Ecta possessed Blank’s sword of stabbing? could she suppress its ability’s? or enhance them(if a baddie got his hands on it)? At the very least if ghosts can move objects, then a ghost working with a person to swing say a war hammer, should be able to swing it with far greater force.

That would be a neat villain, someone with a ghost posse to possess all his/her gear to super charge his/her strength!

I suppose later we can do an entry on types of magic; dark, light and healing are the main ones (conveniently represented by our star trio!). But we’ve spoken in comments before on how healing only speeds up the body’s natural processes. So while Lorelei can fix Skärva up in a jiffy, it’s nothing his body wouldn’t do eventually, albeit that prolonged time would lead to suffering and dangers of blood loss, infection, etc. But she can’t, for instance, heal his black eye which is the result of a magical injury and will never go away on its own, nor could she restore an amputated limb. Essentially – and Victor can correct me if I’m wrong – healing magic is passing the user’s mana into the target to overcharge them with energy and allow their bodies to work extremely fast. UGH STOP GIVING THINGS AWAY – Victor (I didn’t give anything away I was just hinting at something, jeez, but ok. -Courtney)

Is the reason that magic food tastes “horrible” because it’s really hard to conjure, and easily screwed up? Or is it some energy conservation thing where you’d get less mana (and probably nutrients) out of it than you put in? Or something else I haven’t thought of?

Again, Victor can correct me if I’m wrong, but… since what we eat for nourishment, be it meat, vegetables, fruit, bread, nuts, or whatever, came from living things at some point down the line, their chemical makeup is very complex – chemical reactions like bread having been baked, meat having been cooked, etc. add to the complexity as to why it tastes good to us. So trying to teleport that kind of stuff in runs a high risk of messing up its composition, much like living things are so complex it’s easy to mess them up, and even a slight mess-up that might not be visible on the surface could have consequences for taste. Not to mention the mana it would take to teleport in some food would probably be equal or greater to the amount that it contains, rendering the operation useless if your whole point is to replenish yourself… although I suppose not necessarily since it could be in a latent state.

I didn’t really understand the bit about invisibility. Seems like way, way too much work to do semi-mind control just to make something invisible…why not just have a spell that bends light? Would probably be a lot more energy efficient…and not have to rely on people ‘believing’ it.

Invisibility is supposed to be difficult to obtain. I suppose a wizard could try bending light, but that would require a deep knowledge of physics that most people don’t have. I certainly couldn’t do it.

Either way, it would take a very strong spirit and a ton of focus to manipulate light specifically. It’s much easier to work with suggestion, which means that the spirit/mana used doesn’t leave the magical plane, than it is to work magic that has to alter the very make-up of the physical world.

Now hold on a moment…technically speaking, if bending light is so hard, why would manipulating brains – or anything, really – be any easier? How could you say you’d understand the workings behind a brain any better than light? I’d probably attempt light bending – something you can do anywhere – before trying to alter someone’s perception of reality – which could’ve been either risky for the people being fooled or the person trying to fool, depending on whether the person who originally made the spell, (presuming spells’ origins lie with mortals who devise and test them), was trying to fool friends in a controlled enviroment or enemies in a real situation. Imagine all the things that could go wrong when trying to alter someone’s mind! You might permanently damage them…or do nothing at all! At least with light you can have a controlled environment and not worry about causing your test subjects to become brain dead or to horribly murder you after your spell doesn’t quite work as it should.

…and now that I think about it, technically speaking, light bending could be really, really hard and energy consuming, as the light energy you’re initially bending wouldn’t be the light you’re going to bending an instant later. But of course, I don’t know exactly how much energy and spirit are tied to different sorts of actions as well as dealing with different sorts of matter and energy. I suppose light could just be arbitrarily hard to change for no real reason, while minds not so much. But altering a mind, presumably, would be a one time thing where you just do it and it’s done, whereas light bending you’d be forced to constantly bend the incoming light around you – can’t just change a few molecules and have it done – you have to keep focusing…which seems harder to me, especially given your rules – in specific, how casting a spell really takes up all one’s focus unless really, really good at magic.

And now that I think of it, as “spells”, I think light bending would probably be impossible. Unless there’s a way to constantly have magic channeled and continually used – seems to me as though the system requires you to cast a spell and then a direct effect happens and that’s it. I’m guessing that there’s probably no way to have something continually happen, (ie, light constantly being bent), after casting a spell – which is why mind alteration is required in order to do things like invisibility and presumably other illusions.

There’s a difference between the physical brain and magical spirit in Idenau. Spirit is consciousness, so when a wizard performs a suggestion on someone else they are only truly manipulating that person’s magical spirit, completely within the magical plane. There’s really no risk of permanent damage (unless it’s intended) and most suggestion spells are uniform. It would technically be possible to manipulate someone’s physical brain, but that would certainly take knowledge beyond most Idenians.

But why is affecting a spirit any easier than a mind, besides the fact that the spirit resides in the same plane as magic itself and therefore doesn’t have to translate across the planes? Surely a spirit, just like a mind, has its specifics and you can’t just apply any old magic to it in order to get what you want. Surely there’s a technique to it, just like altering a mind would be. Again, presuming that mortal mages devise spells and create them.

Magical spirit is much more accepting and fluid than a mind. Remember that magical spirit completely fills the magical plane, and that people’s spirits are just concentrated amounts of the stuff. Spells are crafted and improved by magical scholars, and generally they reach a point where they are so uniformly taught that the casting part becomes relatively simple. There is a technique, it’s what mages study, but it’s much easier than brain surgery.

As to the map, you could always put up the map with large areas blank, and then fill them in as new areas are revealed. That way you can potentially tease readers to speculate on what may be hidden in those regions, and how they might fit into the story…

Hmm… An interesting system. I like the spirit element of spellcasting as a limitation on how many spells a magic-user might hold at once.

So, questions! Bombard you say, so bombard I do! (In all seriousness, however, feel free to ignore some or all of the below if they are too many. Magic is a favourite topic of mine, so I’ve had a fair bit of thought on such matters myself. ^^; )

1) Can magic be used to alter the shape of space itself? Could a sufficiently powerful mage create magical wormholes, or make two points co-locate?

2) What determines the effect of a given spell? Is it simply the caster holding in their mind what they want to have happen and then forcing that mental construct onto the world via their spirit and mana? Does one produce some other construct instead, such as a set of runes or words, or some arcane structure that relates to the effects produced?

3) Does Derk have any healing ability, even if only self-healing? I’m noting that on Lorelei’s arrival after the recent battle with Blank his request was for bacon, which, given the description above, could have been intended to fuel healing spells.

4) Do constructs (that is to say, creatures or automata created using magic) exist under Idenian magic?

5) How long might an enchantment last?

6) Are enchanted objects common enough to be readily available to the general public? Do barkeeps have chests enchanted to keep drinks cold, or homeowners have enchanted light-sources, or guards have wands of paralysis or truth?

7) Are there any laws or taboos restricting magic, either in the development or use of spells?

8) One thing that I found unclear in the description: are elemental spirits specific to a given element? For example, is a lava elemental only ever a lava elemental, no matter how many jobs she takes? You note that the spirits primarily live outside of the physical, which leaves me wondering whether a given spirit is always tied to a given element, or whether it depends on the job that they’re taking at the moment.

1) No one really knows. It might be possible, but it would require such a deep understanding of physics and such a ridiculous level of magical power that it’s never been attempted. Most magic scholars regard it as impossible.

2) It’s a combination of both, really, although it all happens in a person’s consciousness. Most spells have a certain “word” that you have to say in order to cast them, though this “word” is really the type and amount of focus you apply to your own spirit. On top of that, the caster usually has to focus on what he really wants, such as fire or a stress doll.

3) Bacon is just an all-healing wonderfood.

4) Yes, sparsely. It takes such a strong, constant focus of spirit that it can often be less efficient than just doing something yourself.

5) It depends on the caster, the amount of mana used, and other things. Most enchantments have a charge that can run out, but some particularly powerful items might have unlimited use.

6) Remember that there is also technology (fax machines, etc) in Idenau. Enchanted objects aren’t so incredibly common, but most people know about them.

7) Sure, but I’d need more time to think of them all.

8) Elemental spirits are like Nymphs, they exist as a part of nature. Elemental spirits essentially reside in the part of the magical plane that is tied to some natural thing in the physical plane, i.e. a lava flow. They can be called on to come into the physical world, but only in that kind of area.

Most of the things I would have said for the bush spell has been said but I do see another possibility. He could have summoned a plant elemental spirit to hide inside of.

Also since it’s considered only nearly impossible, would it be possible if there was someone obessed enough to have a unique spell that they practiced for long enough on only that one thing to be able to use teleportation?
Or a much darker thought… is there anyone that would use the fact that it’s hard to reassemble beings correctly in a teleport spell to use teleport spells as an offensive attack, whether as a surefire way to off the enemy or just as a sadistic mutilation?